The cable news audience has peaked

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CNN’s rotten ratings have grown only rottener. The Time Warner-owned news network drew fewer prime-time viewers last week than any week since September 1991, the New York Times just reported. But CNN isn’t the only network riding the down escalator when it comes to ratings. Over the same week, Fox News Channel attracted its fewest viewers in the important 25-to-54-year-old category since July 2008, the Times added. * But CNN isn’t the only cable news network in the doldrums, according to year-by-year data. Various observers have blamed the viewership downturn on the lull in the 2012 campaign, on viewers defecting to the season finales on the entertainment channels and on the lack of breaking news. But I interpret the falloffs as fresh evidence that the audience for cable news has peaked.

The first sign of a peak in cable news appeared in March 2011, when the Pew Research Center released a study that proclaimed, “Though many will remember 2010 as a hard year for CNN, in reality, most cable news channels suffered audience losses.” The able chartists at Pew drew a sad graph of cable news. Combined median viewership for CNN, Fox News and MSNBC during prime time had receded 16 percent, to 3.2 million, that year. Mean viewership had also dropped 13 percent, to 3.3 million, making it the largest year-to-year drop for cable news since Pew started analyzing the numbers in 1997. It also marked the first drop in the median audience since 2006.

The bad news continued through 2011, as cable news viewership remained nearly flat. This was fairly astonishing considering all the breaking news from that year – the Arab Spring, Japan’s tsunami, the killing of Osama bin Laden, the Libyan civil war and the European economic crisis – not to mention the bustle of the presidential campaign.

Among those who noticed that cable news was flatlining was the Atlantic Wire’s Uri Friedman, who surveyed analysts for the underlying reasons in a March 2011 post. The consensus view put the onus on the Web: Now when big news breaks, the polled pundits agreed, the curious go to the Web (often via their mobile device) instead of cable news. Outside the Beltway‘s Doug Mataconis speculated that the potential audience for overtly liberal (MSNBC) and overtly conservative (Fox) TV news had maxed out.

Other possible reasons for the cable news slump is that the three channels (plus CNN’s subsidiary channel, HLN), approached maximum carriage on large cable systems years ago. Upwards of 90 percent of U.S. households already subscribe to cable or satellite TV, and most carry the news channels, so there are very few eyeballs out there that would like to tune in to CNN, Fox News and MSNBC but can’t.

Fox attempted to expand the market for cable news in 2008, when it started the Fox Business Network to compete with CNBC, but it has not succeeded. The network continues to occupy the “bottom tier” of cable channels rated by Nielsen, in part because it’s available on only 50 percent of cable-TV households compared with the 85-plus percent of CNN/HLN, Fox News, MSNBC, and direct competitor CNBC. It’s reasonable to surmise that cable systems don’t want to carry Fox Business because so few viewers are dying for more of the same.

Just because cable news may have peaked doesn’t mean the audience is static. Viewers still move around the dial. For instance, in 2011, CNN and MSNBC gained some prime-time viewers at the expense (Excel spreadsheet) of HLN and ratings colossus Fox News. But the increase in viewership by two standard yardsticks is only 1 percent or 2 percent.

There’s so little news in cable news – especially during prime time – that it’s a bit of a misnomer to keep calling it “cable news.” As currently programmed, the networks best resemble political talk radio, in which people chat about the news instead of report it. That political talk radio has already reached its own “saturation point” has occurred to the industry, talk-radio consultant Randall Bloomquist of Bloomquist Media told me.

“The audience for personality-driven political talk radio has flattened and aged in recent years. Still, radio companies have been reluctant to pull their hand from that still-lucrative jar and experiment with new forms of spoken word programming,” said Bloomquist. “Political talk radio has always viewed the performance of cable news as a key indicator. Peak cable might provide another impetus for radio to start taking some chances with non-political formats, especially shows with an appeal to younger men, something that political talk sorely lacks.”

Although cable news growth may have stalled, don’t weep for the networks. Revenues are still growing. Pew reported in its 2012 study that revenues (both advertising and subscription fees charged to cable systems) were rising at all three of the top channels.

But as cable news has peaked, so too has Fox News Channel President Roger Ailes. He’ll continue to call the plays at his channel, but unless he comes up with something startlingly new, he won’t be able to cause any greater public ruckus with his shows. And if Ailes and Fox News have peaked, what of Media Matters for America, David Brock’s advocacy group? Media Matters polices Fox News with such dedication that it’s become the network’s finest publicist, pushing Fox News stories to liberal audiences who would otherwise never be aware of them. Oh, Media Matters will continue to ding Fox News. But if the Fox News audience isn’t growing, Media Matters can’t expect its followers to be more scandalized about Fox News than they already are.

* Correction, May 25: This article originally cited a flawed New York Times article whose analysis of Fox News rating has been corrected.

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I peaked in 1992. (Disclosure: Randall Bloomquist is a friend and used to write for me in the old days, when I was an editor and just peaking.) When did you peak? Send your confession to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed has yet to peak. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

I think Jack peaked at Slate around the time of Bush’s invasion of Iraq and the story about a chick called Miller at the NY Times who was supporting the falsified data on WNDS, udderwise known as Bush’s wombats! Scooter Libby segued into that story! That was juicy stuff!

My and scott Abbott’s blog archive about the controversial Guenter Grass poem that accuses the Netanjahu government of planning a first strike on Iran has not yet peaked at 1000, an infinite resource!

Of my numerous specialized Handke blogs,
I do have one posting, it is a review of a Handke biography by Malte Herwig, MEISTER DER DAEMMERUNG. Inexplicably it has received nearly 10,000 hits twice the nearest posting. I am usually satisfied if I get 500 hits for a posting. many of the best don’t even get 100 in that fairly specialized field.

I won’t watch CNN because it’s dull and superficial. Pierce Morgan had Slash on and I threw up a bit in my throat at the promo.

However, I really won’t watch Current or MSNBC because they’re “preaching to the choir.” Though when I want a little info or weather I’ll tune there for a few minutes until Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski make me nauseous.

They are all tabloid garbage. CNN, Fox and the others have squandered what potential they had in their rush to ape the National Enquirer. I now simply create my own online news feeds without the idiocy and spoon feeding. The other component is the idiotic cost of pay TV. Contrary to popular belief, folks are still hurting from the 2008 financial meltdown. If you think folks will continue to pay $75 a month and more for shopping channels, duplicate channels, church channels and other nonsense, you’re breathing crack pipe fumes.

I’m an American male (despite my online handle) and look where I am at this very moment. On Reuters! Last I heard it was a British news outlet. I also get my news online from BBC, The Guardian, Deutsche Welle, and to a lesser extent from other online European newspapers (especially Greek at the moment). I’ve even started reading some Chinese, Indian, and Israeli news sources. Why? Because I’m convinced that I’m not getting objective news from the major American sources. It’s biased, twisted, censored or filled with inane junk. There have been many times where I’ve come across an absolutely fascinating bit of news about my own country from a foreign source that one would think would get wide play in the USA, only to find it completely ignored. This had made me very suspicious and cynical about the agendas of the American news conglomerates. I truly believe that they want us to be ignorant and misinformed about important matters. And they want us to meekly accept the pablum that America is the best country in the world, with the best people, the best opportunities for success, the best of everything. That way we won’t be demanding any fundamental changes. And enough of this American Exceptionalism rubbish. Exceptional at what precisely? Anything one names can be found to be done better elsewhere. Except military might. Which may be why we are always so eager to use it indiscriminately.

I haven’t had TV where I live for the last 10 years. When I need to know the news right now, I turn to the internet and get the best coverage from Reuters, BBC, etc. The talking heads on TV are, at best, bland, and usually insufferable, especially when you haven’t been around them for a while.

I wonder if the flattening of the viewer trendline played into Warren Buffet’s decision to buy newspapers? Anyway, I fall into the category of ‘pays for the news channels, but doesn’t watch them’. Every time I turn one on, it is guys in suits yelling at each other. I’ll watch some Al Jezera every so often, and like the translated Nigerian news, but I mostly get my news from Reuters website.

I’ll go to the web version of CNN and Fox, mostly to see what ideas they are putting into people’s heads. The comments section on those two sites are appalling.

More people are coming to the realization that TV is a very inefficient medium for information delivery, that it takes you 10 or 20 minutes watching TV to receive the same amount of information you would get in 3 or 4 minutes of reading a good press review somewhere on the Series of Tubes or the home page of BBC, the New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg or pick you own. Heck! Even the Washington Post, that moistened corpse of a newspaper, is superior to all cable news taken together.

Cable news and news in general is communicating on an outdated paradigm. That paradigm made CNN viable when the idea of live coverage captivated an audience. Unless there is a super hot news story, that paradigm is old news. Audience expectations are changing. In a world where we measure news in nanoseconds, cable as well as other news networks have to evolve and keep pace with technology or follow the path of dinosaurs. Loraine Antrim, http://twitter.com/#!/loraineantrim